News

Our newly-commissioned Lucky Imaging and High Speed Photometry (LIHSP) cameras on FTN and FTS scored a great success on June 23rd at their first attempt to collect science data, catching occulations of both Pluto and its satellite Charon from FTN!  An "occultation" is simply the transit of an object along the line of sight to a star, From occultations of Kuiper Belt Objects, you can learn about their size, and a for large one like Pluto, its atmosphere and orbital parameters of its satellites (Charon). These events, however, are very short, only a few seconds, and to catch it our cameras were taking 10 images per second, 18000 images for a half hour of obseration! We worked with a large group of pluto hunters, involving many observers and many telescopes, all trying to image the same events from different parts of the globe: many astronomers had to travel to remote locations with their gear. The group effort was organized by Dr Leslie Young (SWRI). You can read about it on this National Geographic blog.